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In the near future I plan on cleaning up my bookshelves (running out of room) and placing only books that have been indexed on the shelves.  Is there any way that I can periodically search to see if any of my previously un-indexed books have been indexed?  I would then bring that book out of storage and onto the shelves.   In addition, how do most people group their books?  I would assume it is by cuisine.

Thanks

Doug

The default sort of your Bookshelf is by latest indexed book.  So when you click the Books tab you will see which of your books are now indexed at the top of the list.

Re organization I've got about 1,400 cookbooks so I need organization otherwise I've no hope of finding a book. I recently moved and I'm having new shelves built this week and when I unpack all the books I'm using the same system - by subject. Baking/desserts (sub-divided into cakes, cookies, bakeries, ice-cream, etc); Restaurants; Ethnicity; Special diet (Vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, etc); Dish/ingredient (pasta, meat, fish, etc); General. There are times when a book falls into two categories (e.g. Italian vegetarian) but at least that's only two shelves to look at. Oh and I do have complete shelves of prolific authors I use a lot and own most of their books - Nigella, Jamie, Nigel.  And all the Cook's Illustrated books are shelved togather, regardless of subject.  It works for me!

My collection isn't as big as Jane's, but I also organize by categories. In my kitchen (away from the cooking area), I have a large six shelf bookcase and a smaller three shelf one.

The small case holds my binders of recipe clippings and my Baking/Dessert cookbooks where I have these categories:

General/Compendium (the hefty ones!)

Specialty bakery/restaurant books (Chez Panisse, Moosewood, Macrina, Tartine etc.)

Chocolate (yes, I have a whole section of chocolate!)

Other single ingredient/single recipe type books (Lemon desserts, Berry desserts, muffins, cakes, ice cream, etc.) --I would have liked to include my bread books here, but ran out of room, so they are on the other bookcase.

The large bookcase has mostly savory (& mixed) cookbooks in these categories:

General/Compendium (again, the BIG ones!)

General vegetarian

"Healthy" (an obviously personal designation as healthy means different things to different people -- for me, this category kind of spills over from vegetarian, and then kind of runs into the next category...)

Seasonal/Local/Organic/Farm Market/Garden/Vegetable

Quick/Easy

Food personality/food writer/author-based books

Appliance books (slow cooker, grill, etc.)

Regional books (Italian, French, Mexican, etc. etc.)

Bread & other single ingredient/recipe type books (soups, etc.)

Preserving/DIY "project" type books 

Holidays/entertaining

Misc. (a few random books that don't really fit well into any of the other categories or that don't fit where they belong (I try to keep this to a minimum!)

My shelves were a disorganized mess when I moved to my current home and unpacked them randomly just to get them out of boxes, but getting them categorized again has made such a huge difference! As Jane said, there is always some cross-over, but still makes finding what you are looking for so much easier. 

There are about 40 books in the kitchen. 

The main shelf has the most-used 20-plus: general bibles and veg-centric home cooking (Joy, Art of Simple Cooking, Silver Palate Good Times, Veg.Cooking for Everyone, Victory Garden, Veg. Epicures, Plenty, Herbfarm, and the like) and reference (Pepin Techniques, Peterson Essentials, Ruhlman Ratio).

The lower shelf is cuisines (Mediterranean, Mexican, Indian, Thai, Chinese) and second-tier general/veg (New Basics, Laurel's Kitchen, Alton Brown, Julia Kitchen Wisdom) and a few specialized things like grilling, pressure cooker, artisan bread.

The adjacent sitting room has a bookcase with another 60 books or so.  Most of my mother's books are there, with less frequently used books of mine.  They're just one shelf, visible in its entirety, but still grouped:  reference (Larousse, Harold whatzisname), cuisines, general, specialized (preserving, microwave, etc.). 

The main kitchen shelf also has the three shoebox files of clippings and recipe cards my mother accumulated -- sorted into tabbed sections per the categories used in the Joy of Cooking.  My binder and notebooks are over in the pantry area where I do planning and note-taking.  And procrastinating -- such as checking out the EYB forum <g>!

Doug,

Up until a few days ago I organized mine by subject (general, fermenting, preserving, vegetables, fruits, vegetarian, baking, desserts, meats, specific cooking methods, international/regional, etc.), then by size (biggest first) so the change in subject was a bit more apparent as each section usually started with a taller book. I still do that for my un-indexed books. Since coming here I have reorganized a bit. I printed off a list of all my indexed books in title alpha order and re-shelved the books on the list in alpha order on my shelves. This way I can find indexed books quickly when I have found a recipe I want to use on EYB. If I can't find what I need on EYB I only have to manually search the unindexed books, and it's a straightforward task as they are segregated from the indexed books. At the very end of the shelves I have the magazines and books that aren't in the EYB system yet. The only tricky bit I have encountered with this new system is returning the book to the shelf...ummm indexed or not? If it continutes to be an issue I think I will make a cardboard "removed" thing to slide in like we used to have in the reserved section in the library.

-- Elizabeth

I'm with you Elizabeth: to make re-shelving easier I've put a small blue dot on the spine of each indexed book!

Ohhhhh....good idea! I have a bunch of those little dots already - I used to pop them on the spine of DVD cases when the kids were young so they knew at a glance what was G, PG, and keep away.  :)